Category Archives: Oracle

Bridging the Gap: Hybrid Cloud – blurring the lines between public and private cloud capabilities

Hybrid CloudThe public cloud is often seen as something that sits outside the enterprise. But its capabilities can be brought in-house.

The benefits of cloud are now widely known; a faster time to market, streamlined processes and flexible infrastructure costs. The public cloud model also provides rapid access to business applications or shared physical infrastructure owned and operated by a third party. It is quick to provision, and the utility billing model employed in a public cloud means companies only pay for the services they use. And, with costs spread across a number of users, costs are kept under control.

This works especially well for certain business applications that support HR, Sales, Marketing and Support.  It is also ideal for training, development and testing – where there are sporadic bursts of activity.

Private cloud, on the other hand, offers a bespoke infrastructure dedicated to an individual business, either run on-premises or hosted within a data center run by the cloud provider. This provides most of the benefits of the cloud – an agile, scalable and efficient cloud infrastructure – but with greater levels of control and security for the business than is offered by the public cloud, and as a result, often has a slightly higher level of cost.

A private cloud is often perceived to offer the best option for mission critical applications, or those that demand a higher level of customisation – something that can be more difficult to achieve in a public cloud environment. It can also reduce latency issues, as services are accessed over internal networks rather than the internet.

Bearing these factors in mind, a private cloud tends to work well for large and complex applications or organisations and those with stricter obligations around data and regulation.

Historically, customers have been faced with the dilemma of which model to use – public or private.  They’ve had to make a decision, one application at a time. This is mainly because public and private have had very different setups. There has not been an ability to seamlessly pick up workloads and move them back and forth between the private and public cloud.  Each ‘burst’ or ‘cross-over’ from on-premise to on-cloud (or vice versa) requires different provisioning code, security profiles, network configurations, testing and automation tools. It’s just too difficult!

Fortunately, when considering the move to cloud, it doesn’t have to be an either/or decision anymore: hybrid cloud enables companies to utilise a mixture of both, and is giving organizations new strategic options. It is about providing the exact same infrastructure, security policies and toolsets, and, at the very last stage, choosing a deployment option – either on-premise or on-cloud.

One of the key benefits of operating a hybrid cloud is that it enables users to move applications and workloads between environments depending on demand, business needs and other variables. This mixed approach means businesses can rapidly respond to operational developments — for example using public cloud to quickly and cost-effectively develop and test new applications, before moving them back behind the firewall as they go into production.

It also means more (if not all) of a company’s applications are now ready to take advantage of the benefits of being deployed on a cloud – even if it’s the private cloud to start with.

This is now possible thanks to an evolution in the cloud computing space — the Public Cloud Machine — which uses the same software and hardware as the public cloud to bring the capabilities on-premise, meaning businesses can exploit the power of public cloud infrastructure while having the extra control that in-house data centers provide.

Essentially, it means organizations can address specific business or regulatory requirements, as well as those around data control and data location, while being able to tap into the perceived benefits of the public cloud: agility and pay-as-you go billing.

The hybrid cloud is set to become a business-as-usual expectation from companies.  Oracle is leading with the Public Cloud Machine, getting customers ahead of the curve.

By being able to blur the lines between where one cloud begins and another ends, companies can gain the ultimate flexibility of cloud, become more agile than their competitors and be in a better position to rapidly respond to changing needs and an increasingly competitive environment.

Written by Neil Sholay, Head of Oracle Digital, EMEA at ‎Oracle

Oracle continues efforts to buy its way into the cloud market with $532 million acquisition

Oracle CloudOracle has announced it has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Opower for approximately $532 million.

Opower, which provides customer engagement and energy efficiency cloud services to the utilities industry, boasts a healthy customer list of more than 100 utilities including companies such as PG&E, Exelon and National Grid. The announcement follows a similar one from last week, with Oracle acquiring Textura, a provider of construction contracts and payment management cloud services.

“Utilities want modern technology solutions that work together to meet their evolving customer, operational and compliance needs,” said Rodger Smith, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Oracle Utilities Global Business Unit. “Together, Oracle Utilities and Opower will be the largest provider of mission-critical cloud services to utilities.”

Oracle has certainly changed its tune in recent years, as it was once one of the foremost critics of the technology. “The computer industry is the only industry which is more fashion driven than women’s fashion. I was reading W and it said that orange is the new pink. Cloud is the new SaaS,” Oracle Executive Chairman Larry Ellison said in an analyst briefing in 2008.

While other organizations seemingly embraced cloud as a technology during its embryo days, and have in turn developed a portfolio to compete in this competitive marketplace, Oracle appear to be using financial muscle as a means of levelling the playing field and catching up with industry leaders.

Although the aforementioned acquisitions have increased Oracle’s share in the cloud market place, the company has been on the receiving end of some unfavourable reports recently. Research from JP Morgan highlighted while there are still a number of enterprise organizations who will continue to utilize the services of Oracle, this is more due to the complications of migrating their systems to another vendor, as opposed to the technological strength of the tech giant.

Oracle bolsters construction capabilities with $663mn Textura acquisition

Oracle planeOracle has announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Textura, provider of construction contracts and payment management cloud services.

The deal, valued at approximately $663 million, adds to the Oracle Primavera offering, building on the cloud suite for project cost, time and risk management. Over recent years, Oracle has been making efforts to the re-architect the Oracle Primavera products as a software-as-a-service offering to capitalize on growing digitalization trends within the construction industry.

“The increasingly global engineering and construction industry requires digital modernization in a way that automates manual processes and embraces the power of cloud computing to easily connect the construction job site, reduce cost overruns, and improve productivity,” said Mike Sicilia, GM of Oracle’s Engineering and Construction Global Business Unit. “Together, Textura and Oracle Engineering and Construction will have the most comprehensive set of cloud services in the industry.”

The company now claims to have a complete end-to-end cloud project-solution which manages all phases of engineering and construction projects. Textura’s cloud software currently processes more than $3.4 billion in payments for general contractors, engineers, and subcontractors each month, currently accommodating more than 6,000 different projects.

“Textura’s mission is to bring workflow automation and transparency to complex construction projects while improving their financial performance and minimizing risks,” said David Habiger, CEO at Textura. “We are excited to join Oracle and bring our cloud-based capabilities to help extend the Oracle Engineering and Construction Industry Cloud Platform.”

The acquisition builds on Oracle’s continued efforts to provide industry specific solutions, where the company reportedly spends more than $700 million annually.

Oracle acquisition boosts position in data-as-a-service market

ContractOracle has announced its intention to acquire Israeli machine-learning company Crosswire, in a bid to strengthen its Data-as-a-Service offering.

The Crosswire technology enables marketers and publishers the opportunity to increase cross-device advertising, personalization and analytics, and builds on Oracle’s efforts to bolster its position in the smart data market segment.

“Uniting identity across desktop, browsers and mobile apps to create a meaningful and consistent relationship with customers and prospects has become one of the critical challenges for marketers,” said Omar Tawakol, General Manager at Oracle Data Cloud. “Identification methods are different on every device and across every channel, and solving this can enable marketers to have a significantly more effective dialogue with the consumer and save billions of advertising dollars.”

The team claim in combining the Crosswire capabilities with its Data Cloud portfolio, marketers will be able to build a graphical representation to identify how consumers interact with their digital devices. Oracle currently has such an offering within its portfolio, though the company claims the Crosswire capabilities increases the accuracy of the data, which in theory offers marketers the opportunity to better allocate advertising budgets.

“Oracle Data Cloud is the fastest growing global Data as a Service business, aggregating more than 3 billion profiles from over 15 million websites in its data marketplace and operating the most accurate ID Graph to enable understanding of consumer behaviour across all media channels,” said Tawakol. “The addition of Crosswise further broadens the Oracle ID Graph to construct a complete view of consumers’ digital interactions across multiple devices.”

The acquisition builds on moves by Oracle over recent years to bolster its cloud business. The company bought Ravello Systems for an estimated $500 million in February, as well as numerous acquisitions in 2015 including CloudMonkey, Maxymiser, and StackEngine.

Oracle expands cloud offering into customer datacentres

Oracle CloudOracle launched Cloud at Customer, a new service designed to extend Oracle’s cloud into a customer’s datacentre.

The service allows companies to place an Oracle cloud server within their own datacentre to create a hybrid environment where customers can choose whether to run workloads on the Oracle cloud or on premise. Oracle claims the new offering will remove a number of barriers to cloud adoption, as the customer will retain control on what data is stored where, removing any residency or security concerns for business critical data.

“We are committed to helping our customers move to the cloud to help speed their innovation, fuel their business growth, and drive business transformation,” said Oracle’s President of Product Development Thomas Kurian. “Today’s news is unprecedented. We announced a number of new Cloud Services and we are now the first Public Cloud Vendor to offer organizations the ultimate in choice on where and how they want to run their Oracle cloud.”

The company claims it is the first in the industry to offer such a service and aims to address security and regulatory barriers for cloud adoption. Oracle stressed the service complies with many security and data regulations including FedRAMP for the US federal government, Germany’s Federal Data Protection Act and the United Kingdom’s Data Protection Act.

Data security and residency has been a topic of healthy discussion in recent months following the EU decision to dismiss Safe Harbour and the introduction of its successor Privacy Shield. Oracle could be capitalizing on the concerns of cloud buyers as it claims the offering answers business, legislative and regulatory obstacles enterprise organizations face when considering the transition to a cloud platform.

The new product launch forms part of Oracle’s general cloud offensive. “Oracle is now selling more new SaaS and PaaS annually recurring cloud revenue than any other company in the world including Salesforce.com,” said Executive Chairman Larry Ellison, during the quarterly earnings call.

“We are growing much faster than Salesforce.com, more than twice as fast. Because we sell into a lot more SaaS and PaaS market than they do. We compete directly with Salesforce.com in every segment of the SaaS customer experience market including sales, service and market.”

Oracle records 40% growth in cloud business

OracleOracle announced its quarterly results with revenues at $9 billion, down 3% in comparison to the same period last year, though the cloud business recorded growth of 40%.

The company missed analyst expectations for total revenues, though earning per share was up at $0.64 versus the estimates of $0.62. Oracle played up growth in its cloud business, particularly PaaS and SaaS, where revenues were up 57% to $583 million. Total revenues for the cloud business stand at $735 million, though IaaS earnings were down 2% to $152 million.

“Our Cloud SaaS and PaaS revenue growth rate accelerated to 61% in constant currency in Q3,” said Oracle CEO, Safra Catz. “This dramatic revenue increase drove our non-GAAP SaaS and PaaS gross margins up to 51% in Q3 as compared with 43% in Q2. Our cloud business is now in a hyper-growth phase. Our gross margins are climbing toward our target of 80%.”

Although generally considered in the industry to be playing catch up, Oracle has been demonstrating healthy growth over recent months in comparison to competitors. The company claims that it grew twice as fast as Workday and three times faster than Salesforce.com, with the latter receiving particular attention on the earnings call.

“Oracle is now selling more new SaaS and PaaS annually recurring cloud revenue than any other company in the world including Salesforce.com,” said CTO Larry Ellison “We are growing much faster than Salesforce.com, more than twice as fast. Because we sell into a lot more SaaS and PaaS market than they do. We compete directly with Salesforce.com in every segment of the SaaS customer experience market including sales, service and market.”

Ellison also highlighted the potential for future growth in the SaaS segment, where Oracle operates in markets Salesforce.com doesn’t, in particular enterprise resource planning, ERP, and human capital management, HCM. The company is seemingly adamant in beating Salesforce.com at its own game to become the largest SaaS and PaaS company worldwide.

“Oracle Fusion ERP is the overall market leader in the enterprise cloud ERP market. I should say we have more than 10 times the number of ERP customers than Workday. And ERP has always been a much larger market than CRM. Salesforce.com is missing all of that ERP market opportunity,” said Ellison. “And that in term it should make it easy for Oracle to pass Salesforce.com and become the largest SaaS and PaaS cloud company in the world.”

The company anticipates growth will continue in the next quarter, though analysts anticipate a number of challengers to Oracle’s retained customers over the coming months. With competitors, including AWS and Microsoft, expanding their offering in the database business, the flexibility of Oracle’s proposition and pricing could be called into question.

“People are coming after us, because we are by far the market leader in database. If you’re in the database business, the only one you can come after is us,” said SVP Investor Relations, Ken Bond “So, of course, Amazon, they’re going to be in the database business too is coming after us, and of course Microsoft wants to be bigger in the database business, they have to come after us.”

Oracle buys enterprise workload manager Ravello Systems for a reported $500m

OracleOracle has disclosed details of its acquisition of workload management specialist Ravello Systems. No financial terms were revealed over the deal, but sources familiar with the company value the sale at $500 million, according to venture capital news site Venturebeat.

Ravello, which makes tools that help enterprises manage their enterprise workloads in the cloud, signed an agreement to be acquired on February 22 with all employees joining Oracle’s Public Cloud division.

The new management features will help Oracle’s Public Cloud beef up the performance of its computing, storage and networking workloads. Oracle has launched a number of initiatives aimed at positioning its cloud business more favourably against market leaders Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

In February BCN reported how Oracle had added new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud offerings from its Slough data centre, which currently caters for 500 UK and global customers. Clients from both the private and public sector are being promised tailored versions of the new services, which include Oracle’s Database, Dedicated Compute, Big Data and Exadata cloud services.

Palo Alto based Ravello was founded in 2011 and was balancing the cloud workloads for clients such as Arista, Brocade, Red Hat, SUSE and Symantec. In total it had raised $54 million in funding from venture capitalists such as Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners because its Cloud Application Hypervisor offered enterprises a way to unify the application environment across public and private clouds.

Ravello CEO Rami Tamir explained on the company web site why the technology will be part of the Oracle Public Cloud. “This agreement will accelerate our ability to reach more customers,” said Tamir, “our top priority is ensuring an uninterrupted service and seamless experience for you and all of our customers and partners. Rest assured, Ravello’s service will continue as is. Ravello will join Oracle’s IaaS mission to allow customers to run any type of workload in the cloud.”

Samsung and Oracle in mobile cloud development pact

mobile online datingSamsung and Oracle are to combine their respective device and cloud expertise in a pact to jointly create tools, apps and enterprise systems for the mobile world.

The two partners are working with systems integrators to help industries make use of their existing systems in the cloud, modernising them to take full advantage of the new mobile and cloud and create cost efficiencies. Another joint ambition is to create a wider set of Apache Cordova plug-ins and code samples to help customers modernize their enterprise applications.

The objective, according to Young Kim, VP of the Enterprise Business Team at Samsung Electronics, is to use the cloud to create better mobile user experiences out of their collective expertise in enterprise software, mobile cloud and device features.

Samsung and Oracle want to help developers and solution providers to create the next generation of mobile applications and services and drive ‘a new frontier of productivity’ according to Kim.

Samsung and Oracle have worked with systems integrators on new cloud based mobile and Internet of Things systems, which will be unveiled at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. These include an HCL Technologies-inspired predictive maintenance system for Samsung Gear S2, the Oracle IoT Cloud Service and the Oracle Service Cloud. This digests data and uses this intelligence so that enterprises can cut the costs of high value asset maintenance. Another invention, from Sofbang’s contracts management team, speeds the management and approval of contracts through notifications on Samsung Gear S wearables. The data is protected by Samsung’s cloud-based KNOX mobile security. Another system that combines wearable devices and the cloud is L&T Infotech’s, which hooks into the Oracle IoT Cloud Service using Samsung tablets, smartphones and wearables to increase asset operating life, decrease downtime and cater for proactive maintenance.

Samsung said it is beefing up its support of Apache Cordova with extra plugins for developers to use in the Oracle Mobile Application Framework and Oracle JavaScript Extension.

“The support and unique additions found in Samsung hardware helped us create differentiated end user experiences in weeks with Oracle Mobile Cloud Service,” said Mia Urman, CEO at development partner Auraplayer.

Cloud merits acknowledged but adoption concerns linger – Oracle report

cloud question markCloud technology is almost universally acknowledged for its catalysing effect on invention and customer retention, according to new research from Oracle. However, there are still major barriers to adoption.

In Oracle’s study 92% of its sample group of industry leaders testified that the cloud enables them to innovate faster. It also helps companies keep afloat better, with nearly three quarters (73%) reporting that using cloud technology has helped them to retain existing customers more effectively. The cloud also comes out well as a strategic weapon, with 76% of enterprises saying that the newer, more flexible model for handling information helps them to win new customers.

However, the study conducted for Oracle by IDG Connect indicates there is much room for improvement in the adoption of cloud computing. Only half (51%) of the survey sample say their businesses will have reached cloud maturity within two years. According to an Oracle statement, this is a consequence of current uncertainty about moving to the cloud.

Though a compromise between privately owned IT systems and publicly available services is seen as the obvious choice, there are grave concerns about hybrid cloud adoption. Instead of getting the best of both worlds with a hybrid system, many users (60%) reported that the thought of managing multiple IT architectures was off putting. There are fears about the reliability and availability of network bandwidth, which was cited by 57% of the survey as a barrier to adoption. The lack of trust in the relationship with IT suppliers was also a major concern with 52% of the survey sample. Meanwhile those building private cloud infrastructures continue to see security as the prime concern, according to Oracle.

Attitudes could change, but that involves converting the considerable opposition of cloud-sceptics.  There are still significantly large numbers of IT experts who say that winning over key business decision makers is their biggest challenge. This was identified as an issue for 29% of those surveyed.

Johan Doruiter, Oracle’s Senior VP of Systems in EMEA, remained optimistic. “As cloud rapidly reaches maturity, we are seeing a shift in how enterprises perceive the chief benefits and barriers to adoption,” he said. “Traditional concerns have been replaced by the operational worries.”

Oracle launches a mission critical PaaS from its Slough data centre

OracleOracle has added new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud offerings from its Slough data centre, which currently caters for 500 UK and global customers.

Clients from both the private and public sector are being promised tailored versions of the new services, which include Oracle’s Database, Dedicated Compute, Big Data and Exadata cloud services.

Oracles claims that it is offering enterprises a mission critical PaaS and outlined four main selling points for the new services. Clients will now be able to develop, test and launch applications much more rapidly and cheaply, it claims. No supporting figures were given to exemplify this, however. Secondly, the new service will give companies greater flexibility without compromising their security, Oracle claims.

It will also use Hadoop’s open-source software framework for storing data and running applications on clusters of commodity hardware. This, says Oracle, will provide massive storage for any kind of data, boost the available pool of processing power and allow the data centre to handle a far greater volume of concurrent jobs. Oracle claimed that this can be delivered as a secure, automated service that meshes with existing enterprise data in Oracle Database. The fourth plank of its new offering is instant access to a virtual computing environment to run large scale applications on the Oracle Cloud.

Oracle currently has 19 data centres running its Oracle Cloud from various points of the globe. Last week it announced the intention to open a new Cloud data centre in Abu Dhabi. Oracle will be investing in two new cloud sales centres in Amsterdam and Cairo along with new offices opening this year in Dubai, Dublin and Prague.

In December 2015, BCN reported that Oracle’s co-chief executive Safra Catz warned fiscal 2016 will be “a trough year for profitability as we move to the cloud.”

In January 2016, however, BCN reported that Oracle had announced aggressive expansion plans with a recruitment drive for junior and senior sales staff to be based in six cities across EMEA.

The cloud software giant is now actively headhunting for 1,400 new cloud sales staff to work out of sales HQs in Amsterdam, Cairo, Dubai, Dublin, Malaga and Prague.